Education: Harvard University; graduated cum laude with a BA in English

TOMMY LEE JONES has been around for a very long time.

His first movie was Love Story in 1970; but, it wasn’t until the 90’s that he finally attained A-list status.

The Tommy Lee Jones of the '70s and '80s usually played gangsters, rotten businessmen or murderers, like his Emmy-winning role as Gary Gilmore in 1982's The Executioner's Song. It wasn't until 1989, when he epitomized the morality of the Western cowboy as Woodrow Call in the television miniseries Lonesome Dove, that Tommy Lee Jones began to make the transition from bad man to leading man. With few exceptions (notably as Two-Face in Batman Forever), the new, improved Tommy Lee Jones of the 90s is a hero. He's an admittedly tough, abrasive hero, but a hero nonetheless. The change began in earnest with his Academy Award-winning performance as a dogged U.S. Marshal in The Fugitive, for which he also received a Golden Globe and a Los Angeles Film Critics Award. Tommy Lee Jones then got up steam with his flamboyant turn as a high-powered attorney in The Client, and as alleged assassination conspirator Clay Shaw in Oliver Stone’s JFK. His co-starring role opposite Will Smith in Men in Black helped propel the science-fiction comedy to blockbuster status as 1997's top grossing film.

This Texas-born, Harvard-trained star roomed with future Vice President Al Gore in his college days and certainly doesn't think of himself as a hero. He's just interested in working steadily -- partly to support his family (two ex-wives and two kids) and maintain his 3,000-acre ranch outside San Antonio, and partly for a more selfish reason.

"I'm an actor, and I like being me," Jones says. "I love acting. I like the process. It's a privilege to make your living with your imagination. That's what it takes to make me feel special. Some people require money to feel special, some require travel, some people have different needs. Living with and by my imagination is what it takes to make me feel clean and healthy."